Odnaleźć ciało błyskawicy
To Find the Body of Lightning

On Selected Characters and Productions of the Odin Teatret

Summary/Abstract: The article aims to define theatrical characters in selected productions by Eugenio Barba: their distinctive qualities, the way they are constructed, the meanings they carry, and the functions they perform. A look at how theatrical character can be understood by a theatre practitioner, actor, director and pedagogue Charles Dullin; a sociologist, Jean Duvignaud; and a semiologist, Anne Ubersfeld, serves as the starting point for the inquiry. The origins of the characters that inhabit the world represented in Odin Teatret productions can be grasped by assuming two points of view: by construing the character as “a strictly poetic locus” (Ubersfeld), and by comprehending the actor’s techniques as techniques “of a personality, of a particular and unique body-mind” (Barba). The figures of human imagination brought onto the stage in Barba’s productions are born out of this bifocal vision. Seemingly paradoxical and nonsensical, they come from an unknown part of the soul, just as dreams do, according to Jung. Characters portrayed by Odin Teatret actresses, Iben Nagel Rasmussen (White Angel, Shaman, the mute Kattrin, and Trickster) and Julia Varley (Doña Musica, Kristen Hastrup, Mr Peanut, and Daedalus), supply examples for the analyses carried out by the author.

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